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It is with great pleasure that I present to you Double Dynamo, now available on the App Store:

Many thanks to family, friends, and fans who have helped me get this far. Please support me by spreading the word — share on Facebook, tweet the link on Twitter, tell your friends, and buy a copy for your loved ones.

Also, since reviews are such an important part of how people choose which apps they download, please consider taking a minute to write an honest review. I would very much appreciate it.

If you have any suggestions or run into problems, leave a note on the feedback page and I’ll try to get back to you as soon as I can.

We here at Double Dynamo HQ (all one of us) are gearing up for the big day tomorrow. I’m very excited to get the game into your hands, and I’ve decided to start the launch with a 67% off sale for the early adopters.

Please help make Double Dynamo a success — take a moment to share on Facebook, send a tweet, post on your Google+, tumblr, Myspace, and Geocities pages. Thank you for all your support!

You may have already seen hints or heard through unofficial channels, but I am pleased to officially announce the release date of the game that I have been pouring my heart and soul into for the better part of a year. Ladies and gentlemen, 8 months in the making, Double Dynamo will make its public debut on October 1, 2013.

That’s this coming Tuesday, for those keeping track.

Get those twittering, tapping, pattern-matching fingers ready, and prepare to break your brain. It’s just a few short days away!

Rewards are powerful motivators and we should use every tool available to us in the quest to become better versions of ourselves. So how about rewarding yourself for going to the gym? After a good workout it’s tempting to indulge yourself with a rich meal or an ice cream sandwich. Won’t the positive reinforcement make you want to go to the gym more often?

Setting aside the obvious caloric difficulties, this kind of policy can lead to problems. You might end up going to the gym more often, at least in the short term, but only at the expense of your experiencing self. The pure joy of exercise will fade and you’ll find you’re only doing it for the eventual reward. Besides, if you’re only going to the gym to justify eating ice cream, intuitively it feels like you’re doing it for the wrong reasons.

Indeed, ongoing research since the 1970’s has shown that rewards can undermine existing motivations, even after the reward stimulus is removed.

Experimental psychologists Mark Lepper and Richard Nisbett demonstrated this in the early 1970’s with the following experiment: they divided a population of young children into three groups. They told Group A that they would get a ribbon as a reward for drawing. They rewarded Group B in the same way, but didn’t tell them about the ribbons ahead of time. Group C was simply allowed to draw for the same period of time and was not rewarded. Later on, during free play time, children from Group A spent significantly less time drawing than children from the other groups.

For the Group A kids, drawing changed from an enjoyable activity into an opportunity to receive praise. They interpreted (or justified) their own drawing behavior as happening because of the reward.

This effect has been replicated across a wide range of age groups and activities.

Notably, overjustification happens most strongly with larger rewards, and almost not at all (or even in reverse) with smaller ones: the former provides a plausible story for justification, while the latter leaves experimental subjects reinterpreting even boring activities as fun or interesting.

“[Self-reinforcement] is something we often neglect to do, partly because it doesn’t occur to us, and partly because we tend to demand a lot more of ourselves than we would of others.… As a result we often go for days at a time without letup, going from task to task to task unnoticed and unthanked even by ourselves. Quite aside from reinforcing oneself for some habit change or new skill, a certain amount of reinforcement is desirable just for surviving daily life.”

Here are some guidelines for effective reinforcement gleaned from Don’t Shoot the Dog! and my own experimentation:

DO use small rewards (eat an M&M, smile to yourself, do a power pose, give yourself a compliment, or step out into the sunshine).

DO use reinforcement for tasks that aren’t fun in themselves.

Once you establish a consistent routine, try flipping a coin and only reward on heads (this is a very common technique in gamedesign and might be familiar if you’ve ever been to a casino).

Keep records and make graphs so that improvement can be seen at a glance and lapses are put into context.

Reinforcements are most effective when they immediately follow the behavior you are trying to shape.

The entire context is reinforced, not just the habit you are shaping: rewards can change the way you feel about the people you spend time with and the places you frequent, so be careful.

DON’T punish yourself. Not only is it unpleasant, it’s surprisingly ineffective.

Before you set up an incentive scheme to “get yourself” to do something, think about the behavior you’re really reinforcing and think about whether you are willing to sacrifice the joy of the experience itself.

Why all this talk about rewards and habits on a game blog? A big part of my motivation for producing Double Dynamo in the first place was curiosity: what makes people tick? how can I work most effectively? It’s certainly been rewarding working on my own habits as the project has gone from conception to implementation, and very soon, to launch.

Last Thursday I wrote about taking advantage of the peak-end rule to make it easier to do more of the things you want to be doing, like going to the gym. That technique works because our memories and our experiences don’t always align — we’re in some sense made up of two different selves, what Daniel Kahneman calls the remembering self and the experiencing self.

There’s another way to think of yourself as being made of different selves, and it leads to the very useful technique of setting policies and sticking to them.

Fragmented Selves

I’ve always been active, but I’ve never been an endurance runner. Every time I tried running for more than five minutes I wound up out of breath and in pain. But a few years ago something changed, and I realized that if I pace myself properly I can run moderate distances without too much trouble. And though it’s still a little painful, I discovered that running doesn’t tire me out like I expected, it’s a great way to warm up for other kinds of exercise, and it reliably generates that post-workout high.

Still, once I added running on the treadmill (or as a friend likes to call it, the hamster wheel) to my workout routine, I ended up going to the gym less often. At home I would remember the pain of running and sometimes decide not to go to the gym at all. Realizing this, I stopped bringing my running shoes and the problem went away. (This is not as strange as it sounds: my gym is a rock climbing gym and I spend most of my time there in climbing shoes.)

Except now there was a new problem: once I got to the gym I wanted to run and I couldn’t because my shoes were at home.

What’s going on here?

The version of me at home felt deterred by the pain of running, and the version of me at the gym just wanted to get on the treadmill. Me-at-home had just woken up — of course I didn’t feel like running at that point. Me-at-the-gym had just biked to the gym and was already half warmed up — of course I felt like running. The problem was, the one making the decision to run was me-at-home.

Let the Best Self Decide

I resolved my dilemma by instituting a personal policy: always bring running shoes to the gym but don’t make the decision to run until I walk in the door. Me-at-home thinks, “Packing these shoes does not oblige me to run. I’ll only run if I really feel like it.”

Now the decision feels like a game, and when I leave the house I find myself wondering which way I’ll decide. Will I run or not? The anticipation makes me want to go to the gym more, not less.

The key, however, is to be honest with your past and future selves. The policy only works because me-at-home and me-at-the-gym have an understanding. If me-at-the-gym doesn’t actually feel like running but I make myself do it anyway — because “I might as well, since I have my shoes with me” — then me-at-home will feel betrayed.

In fact, the first time I put the policy in effect I intentionally didn’t run on the treadmill even though I wanted to. I did this to set a precedent and to signal to myself that I was taking the policy seriously.

The Art of Making Deals With Yourself

A good personal policy is an agreement between selves that you can feel good about on both ends, and crafting one is an art. It’s harder than it sounds and is full of subtle pitfalls. Here are some rules of thumb that may help you build policies of your own:

Understand how you discount the pleasure and pain of future events in inconsistent ways.

Be flexible and adjust your policies over time as your circumstances change. Don’t be alarmed when the technique that seems like a magic bullet “wears off” after a few months.

This idea of trading or negotiating with future selves is closely related to the idea of identity, which I’ll be writing about in a future post. I’ll also come back to this idea in the context of productivity and time management. Coming up next: the right way to motivate yourself with rewards.

Have you ever struck a deal with your future self? How has it worked out? I’d love to hear your stories in the comments.

“We actually don’t choose between experiences. We choose between memories of experiences. And even when we think about the future we don’t think of our future normally as experiences. We think of our future as anticipated memories.”

– Daniel Kahneman

I often have trouble getting myself to do the things that I’d like to be doing, like going to the gym or meditating regularly. Recently I ran across a big idea that helped me understand why this is true, and also provided a few hints that allowed me to improve the situation.

The eminent professor of psychology and economics Daniel Kahneman gave a TED talk a few years ago about two fundamentally different ways we experience our lives: our first-hand experiences as we live through them, and our memories and stories that we come up with after the fact. He calls these two perspectives the experiencing self and the remembering self.

[youtube=http://youtu.be/XgRlrBl-7Yg&rel=0]

These two selves are often in direct conflict, and Kahneman points out that the remembering self usually runs the show when it comes to making decisions:

“You can think of the remembering self sort of dragging the experiencing self through experiences that the experiencing self doesn’t need.”

On the other hand, sometimes the situation is reversed and the experiencing self makes the decisions — we’ve all done something that seemed appealing at the time and regretted it later. To rephrase the above, “you can think of the experiencing self sort of saddling the remembering self with memories that the remembering self doesn’t need.” We seem to be particularly bad at balancing the needs of these two systems.

So how can we live in a way that satisfies both selves?

In my own life the two selves often butt heads. Let’s take a closer look at the example of deciding to go to the gym.

The experiencing self has both ups and downs while I’m actually there, but the remembering self wants to package the entire activity into a single, compact impression. That impression can be one of pain, frustration, or wasted effort, and it’s hard to talk myself into repeating the experience. I do still go to the gym, though, and I even look forward to it. How do I manage it?

Use the Peak-End Rule

One strategy you can use is to encourage your remembering self to have good impressions of the experiences you want to repeat on a regular basis. The remembering self thinks in stories, according to Kahneman, stories that are defined by “changes, significant moments, and endings.” This is the peak-end rule of psychology.

I take advantage of this rule by making sure that the final moments of the gym-going experience are overwhelmingly positive: I breathe deeply, take a hot shower, smile at the workers at the front desk on the way out, and bike fast on the way home.

As a result, the next time I think about going to the gym I remember the good feelings from the previous session and expect to repeat them.

Other Strategies

I’ve accumulated a number of strategies and a few cautionary tales that have helped me be more effective and productive and do more of the things I want to be doing:

It wasn’t always this way: some days I’d hit the snooze button over and over, and when I got up I felt like I hated everything until lunchtime. But a few years ago I added something that makes me want to get out of bed and greet the day. A Ritual.

My ritual began when I was working at a small startup in San Bruno, a 20-minute BART ride from my apartment. Every morning before hopping on the train I walked to my neighborhood coffee shop, ordered an Americano, and watched the other customers smile and talk.

Sometimes I brought a book and read a chapter. Sometimes I did a Times crossword puzzle. Usually I reviewed my Anki deck. And pretty much every morning I pulled out the old iPhone and played a game for 5 or 10 minutes. I felt a rush when I played a good round in Scramble With Friends, or broke though my personal record in Dots, or unlocked a new stage in Super Hexagon: it was the satisfaction of seeing legitimate effort lead to tangible results. Sometimes I thought I felt my neurons rewiring themselves.

It primed the pump: once my mental energies were flowing I felt ready to tackle anything.

My morning ritual has changed a little bit over the years as I’ve tried on some new things and phased out others. But one thing has stayed constant: I am careful to carve out a quiet, unrushed time full of things that I enjoy. And ultimately it inspired me to create the game that is now Double Dynamo.

What’s Your Ritual?

What do you do to get going in the morning? Maybe it’s as simple as singing in the shower, or hitting the pavement for a short run. Maybe you listen to your favorite music. Maybe you work on cooking the perfect scrambled eggs. Maybe you meditate or recite mantras or reaffirm your goals.

The News

Also I want to thank those who sent me questions last week. I won’t get to all of them in this TLAA series — some topics are just too big to cover in this format — but once I’m not allocating all of my thinking time to DD I’ll put something up here or on my personal blog. And I’m still open for more.

Next Up

In the coming week I’ll be working on integrating with Apple’s Game Center and tying up dozens of loose ends and last-minute tasks. It’s coming up real soon, folks!

Questions

Before I go into the usual progress report, I want to quickly check in with you, the reader. Yes, you! I’m writing these updates for your benefit, so if there’s anything specific you’d like me to write about, please let me know! Are you curious about where the ideas for the game came from? How I designed the progression of levels? Maybe you’re wondering when the release date is. Or what my work schedule is like, or what I eat for breakfast. All these and more are fair game — send me an email or leave a comment!

(I had this for breakfast.)

Previously

Last time I made a list of final fundamental changes to the basic flow of the game. In the last few days I ended up working on an item that I neglected to put on the list: high score lists. A few weeks ago I was playing Dots (which, fair warning, has a tendency to swallow up whole hours of your life), and I really appreciated the high score lists. I particularly liked your own list that lets you compare yourself against your past performance. For now, Double Dynamo’s lists are only for tracking your own progress, but eventually you’ll be able to compare your scores with friends on Game Center and Facebook, and with the entire player base.

Along the way I ran into some problems with the JSON library I’m using, rapidjson, and spent a little extra time working around them. Unforeseen setbacks like these are part of the reason it usually takes longer than expected to build software products. It’s humbling to be reminded that my projects are no exception!

What’s Next?

As I mentioned previously, each stage of difficulty in Double Dynamo is broken up into 3 or 4 waves. The next change involves creating a new requirement for advancement: rather than playing through all the waves in a stage regardless of performance, the player will need to pass a certain threshold on each wave before moving on to the next. This will facilitate faster skill acquisition and a fairer and more meaningful experience of advancement. Following that, I’ll be adding clearer notifications of unlocks and achievements, a set of harder stages, and finally some increased variability in scoring.

And that’s the news. Don’t forget to send me your questions and I’ll do my best to answer them!

Previously

The time just before launch is a tricky stage of any product’s development. This is the time when expectations and reality butt heads, when the demon of bad planning reveals itself and reminds you from its position on your sinistral shoulder that it’s been there all along. Immature organizations tend to respond to this inevitability by going into crunch mode, something I’ve experienced and would prefer to avoid. I now find myself with a long list of desiderata and not enough time to check them all off. So what can I do about it?

Cut, cut, cut. Is there a feature that isn’t absolutely essential to the product? Cut it. Is there a feature that can wait until after launch? Postpone it. If what’s left still won’t fit into the time remaining, then and only then should you think about adjusting your deadline.

Last time I talked about Facebook and Game Center integration. I spent a little time doing some research and decided that both are strong candidates for postponement until after launch, so I put them on the back burner. Meanwhile I plowed through a long laundry list of small bugs and tweaks (14 items since Friday) that I’d been putting off. And in the back of my mind I continued thinking about priorities.

What’s Next?

The winner of the priority game is a set of final changes to the basic flow of the game. This has a few different parts:

Currently each stage of difficulty is broken up into 3 or 4 waves. You play through the waves and get an aggregate score at the end. The first change will be to make these waves more meaningful by requiring that you do well enough on each wave before moving on to the next.

Each wave has a fixed number of opportunities to make matches, which means there’s a hard limit to how high you can score. The plan is to add bonus match opportunities under certain conditions, which will lengthen gameplay when you’re playing well.

Clearer messaging around the game structure, how you get a good score, and how you’re doing compared to previous attempts. This sounds vague, but I’ve made it explicit in my notes.

Generate harder stages with a smooth difficulty curve for more advanced players.

This represents a lot of work, and I expect it will take all of this week and likely a day or two into the next. I’ll write another quick update on my progress later in the week. Ciao!